The Outweighed Earth
For nearly all of history, living things vastly outweighed anything people had made. Around 2020, the things people have built, mostly concrete and gravel, caught up with every tree, microbe and whale combined.
Human-made mass in use in 2020, against about 1.12 trillion tonnes of living things, both by dry weight. In 1900 it was 3% of life’s weight.
A flat line meets a doubling one
Life’s total has barely moved since 1900. Human-made mass has doubled about every 20 years, and it now adds about 30 Gt a year: more than each person’s body weight, every week.
Solid area: stock data to 2015. Pale area: the authors’ extrapolation. Grey band: 2020 ± 6 years. Gt = billion tonnes.
From all animals to all of life, on one strip
Each tick is ten times the last. Green marks above the strip are alive; black marks below it were made. Plastic alone outweighs every animal on land and at sea.
* Made mass plus waste in 2040: the authors’ extrapolation if current trends continue, “almost triple” dry biomass.
Four-fifths concrete and gravel
Concrete and aggregates make up 81% of the total. Concrete passed bricks in the mid-1950s and has since grown more than 200-fold from its 1900 level.
Human-made mass in 2020, in Gt, with share of total and the 1900 value in brackets. Aggregates here means gravel and sand used as bedding, not the sand inside concrete.
What now outweighs what
The largest human-made category has overtaken the largest living one, and a single family of synthetic materials now outweighs the animal kingdom.
Each panel has its own scale. Dry weight in the first two panels. Wild land mammals: ≈20 Mt, about 3 kg per person.
The date moves. The direction doesn’t.
Count water in living things and life weighs about 2.2 Tt, which delays the crossing to the 2030s. Count waste and it comes sooner. The study’s definitions all put it between the past decade and the next two.
Central estimate ±1 s.d. from the study’s Monte Carlo simulation. Modeled ranges, not observations.
The pile is the visible part of a much larger flow
About 30 Gt a year stays as stock. The world extracts more than three times that; the rest leaves as food, fuel, emissions and waste. On current trends, extraction rises 60% by 2060.
materials extracted worldwide in 2020, up from 30 bn t in 1970
UNEP IRP 2024of planet-warming emissions come from extracting and processing resources
UNEP IRP 2024of CO₂ from cement in 2024, about 6% of fossil CO₂ (our arithmetic)
Andrew 2025; GCB 2025of land-related biodiversity loss and water stress trace to biomass extraction and processing
UNEP IRP 2024plant mass, roughly halved since the first agricultural revolution; crops are only about 0.01 Tt
Elhacham 2020of materials per person per day, up from 23 kg in 1970; low-income countries use six times less
UNEP IRP 2024Keep what we’ve already made working
Weight doesn’t measure harm, and much of this mass houses and connects people. It does show scale: decisions about what to build and how long to keep it now move as much material as the living world contains.
Sources & notes
- Elhacham, Ben-Uri, Grozovski, Bar-On & Milo (2020). “Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass,” Nature 588, 442–444, plus Extended Data Table 1 and the authors’ open data (github.com/milo-lab/anthropogenic_mass). Source of the crossover years, material breakdown, 3% in 1900, 30 Gt a year, 20-year doubling, body-weight-per-week, 3 Tt by 2040, plastic vs. animals, buildings vs. trees, and plants halved.
- Krausmann, Lauk, Haas & Wiedenhofer (2018). Global Environmental Change 52, 131–140. The material-stock series underlying Elhacham et al.
- Bar-On, Phillips & Milo (2018). “The biomass distribution on Earth,” PNAS 115, 6506–6511. The biomass census underlying Elhacham et al.
- Greenspoon et al. (2023). “The global biomass of wild mammals,” PNAS 120, e2204892120. Livestock, human and wild land mammal mass. Wild marine figure as reported in coverage of the study and a 2023 Nature Ecology & Evolution review.
- UNEP International Resource Panel (2024). Global Resources Outlook 2024 and press release: 30 to 106 bn t since 1970, 23 to 39 kg per person per day, over 60% of emissions, 90% of land-related biodiversity loss and water stress (biomass), +60% by 2060, peak by 2040 and +20% by 2060 in the policy scenario, low-income use six times lower.
- Andrew, CICERO (2025). “Global CO₂ emissions from cement production,” Zenodo record 17287474, version 251007: about 1.5 Gt process CO₂ plus about 0.9 Gt fuel CO₂ in 2024.
- Global Carbon Project (2026). “Global Carbon Budget 2025,” Earth System Science Data 18, 3211: fossil CO₂ of 37.8 Gt in 2024.
- All mass in the crossover, scale and material charts is dry weight, except mammal figures, which are wet weight. 1 Gt = 1 billion tonnes; 1 Tt = 1,000 Gt.
- MODELED, NOT MEASURED: material data run to 2015. The 2020 values are partially extrapolated from 2016, and the 2025–2037 values and “3 Tt by 2040” are the authors’ trend extrapolations, not forecasts of what will happen. Crossover ranges are ±1 s.d. from a Monte Carlo simulation.
- Biomass is 1,120 Gt and human-made mass 1,154 Gt in the authors’ 2020 data; the paper’s abstract rounds biomass to about 1.1 Tt. The 1,154 is our sum of Extended Data Table 1. “Buildings & infrastructure” (1,100 Gt) is the paper’s rounded figure.
- OUR ARITHMETIC: cement ≈6% = (1.5 + 0.9) ÷ 37.8 Gt CO₂. Published estimates, which use different scopes, range from about 5% to 8%. “81%” = (549 + 386) ÷ 1,154. “Doubled since 2000” = 573 to 1,154 Gt.
- Made mass excludes unused mining overburden, soil moved in construction and dredged sediment. The plastic figure includes plastic in use and plastic waste, after recycling. Weight is a measure of scale, not of harm: a tonne of gravel and a tonne of forest are not equivalent.